The Future is Wearable and Shareable: Mary Meeker, Kleiner Perkins

So the fabled Mary Meeker Powerpoint tome hit the internet at the D11 conference this week and, if you have the patience to wade through the stats, the messages are pretty clear: It’s a wearable, shareable future for mankind.

It’s all in the wrist, isn’t it?

It’s not hugely revelatory (you can detect the undertone as you walk down your own street), but the pace of change has certainly caught both consumer and industry unawares. From phone to tablet to wearable tech for the quantified self and computing platform, the entire tech ecosystem is evolving into one where our bodies are an extension of the device. The future of the mobile computing platform may be wearable, but the form it takes is still up for debate and there’s a clear divide: Apple believes it’s the wrist; Google says it’s the face. Knowing Microsoft, they’ll proclaim it’s the knee.

Share and share alike?

They’re all generating data at a constant rate for the enterprise to consume, whether users are aware tacitly or explicitly. And people love to share — or so it seems on the surface. According to Meeker’s report, on average more than 500 million photos are shared per day so far in 2013. This is on pace to double by the end of 2013. But here’s an interesting fact: Snapchat’s success has accelerated where it’s starting to overshadow Instagram as a platform for sharing; I predict that its selling point will become more prevalent across other networks and new tools in the coming years. As Toby Beresford, a social strategist, mused “…[users] like the fact that the digital content disappears, so truly reflecting the stream culture of Gen Y rather than the ocean culture of Gen X.”

Data: Grab it while it’s hot.

So where does this leave the shareable future for business?

If the likes of Snapchat, and other social apps yet to spring forth, begin to take off, it will mean that real-time, right-time processing will have to become more adaptive and able to consume fleeting moments of data before it’s deleted by a user set parameter. Both consumer insight and marketing will change to be less reactive and more predictive based on data that’s only available for seconds, not weeks or months.

We are literally living in the two-second advantage right now. Make those seconds count.

Theo Priestley is regarded as “one of the thought-leaders in BPM…” and is named as one of the Top 50 influencers in Case Management worldwide.
A passionate and outspoken industry analyst rebel, he frequently challenges the BPM industry status quo and writes heavily on his popular BPMredux.com blog which has been referred to as the “seminal blog on the state of BPM“. A regular contributor to industry forums, Techtarget's ebizQ site has called him one of their “most quotable contributors.”
He is especially interested in the convergence of multiple verticals such as CRM, BPM, ECM, and the enterprise social workflow impact on traditional business operating models and process methodologies.
A keen amateur photographer, Theo was a finalist in Photography Forum’s Best of Photography 2011 (out of 14,000 entries worldwide) using just an iPhone 4.
When he has spare time, Theo collects comics and follows the games industry.

1 Comment

Nick P

It seems to me that marketing and advertising is moving from a mass-campaign strategy, to more of a speciliazed niche-marketing approach. No more TV blow-out adds, but when you walk into the store, your smart-device will give you adds that speak to your specific taste. So, the market seems to be more segmented. I would be interested to see what the experts think about when all these competing neuvo-tech smart gizmos hit the market. Would we have 1 dominant player or would it be a highly-segmented market with even-strength competitors guiding and holding the lead?